The Pilot's Wife (13 page)

“I have no idea,” she said.

She wondered: Could Jack have talked to someone that day? Of course he could have. He could have talked to twenty people for all she knew.

Robert had his arms crossed over his chest. He seemed to be studying the coffee table with great interest. On the table were art books, a stone plate Jack and she had brought back from Kenya, an enameled box from Spain.

“Mrs. Lyons,” Somers continued. “Did your husband seem agitated or depressed that day or the night before?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing out of the ordinary. The shower was leaking, I remember, and he was a bit annoyed at that, since we’d only recently had it repaired. I remember he said to call Alfred.”

“Alfred is?”

“Alfred Zacharian. The plumber.”

“And when did he ask you to call Alfred?”

“Twice, actually. Once upstairs about ten minutes before he left. And again as he was walking to the car.”

“Did Jack have a drink prior to his departing for the airport?” “Don’t answer that,” Robert said, sitting forward on the sofa. Kathryn crossed her legs and thought about the wine Jack and she had had with dinner on Saturday night and had continued to have after dinner, and she quickly calculated the number of hours between his last drink and his flight. At least eighteen. That was all right then. What was the phrase? Twelve hours from bottle to throttle?

“It’s all right,” she said to Robert. “Nothing,” she said to Somers.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Did you pack his suitcase?” he asked.

“No, I never do.”

“Or his flight bag?”

“No. Absolutely not. I virtually never looked in there.”

“Do you usually unpack his suitcase?”

“No. That’s Jack’s responsibility. He takes care of his own bags.”

She heard the words,
takes care of
. Present tense.

She looked around at the men in the room, all of whom were examining her intently. She wondered if the airline would want to question her, too. Perhaps she ought to have a lawyer with her right now, she thought. But if that were true, wouldn’t Robert have said so?

“Did your husband have any close friends in the U.K.?” Somers asked. “Did he regularly talk to someone there?”

“The U.K.?”

“England.”

“I know what U.K. means,” she said. “I just don’t understand the relevance of the question. He knew a lot of people in the U.K. He flew with them.”

“Have you noticed any unusual withdrawals from or deposits into any of your bank accounts?” Somers asked.

She wondered where they were going with this, what any of it meant. She felt herself to be on shifting ground, as though at any moment she might step unthinkingly into a crevice.

“I don’t understand,” she began.

“In the last several weeks, or at any time, have you noticed any unusual withdrawals from or deposits into your bank accounts?”

“No.”

“In the last several weeks did you notice any unusual behavior in your husband?”

She had to answer this one, for Jack’s sake. She wanted to answer it.

“No,” she said.

“Nothing out of the ordinary?”

“Nothing.”

Rita, from the airline, stepped into the room, and the men looked up at her. Beneath her suit, she had on a jewel-necked silk blouse. Kathryn couldn’t remember the last time she herself had worn a suit. At school, she almost always wore pants and a sweater, sometimes a jacket, occasionally jeans and boots when the weather was bad.

“Mrs. Lyons?” Rita said. “Your daughter is on the phone. She says she has to talk to you right now.”

Alarmed, Kathryn spun out of the chair and followed Rita into the kitchen. She glanced at the clock over the sink: 9:14.

“Mattie,” she said, picking the phone up from the counter.

“Mom?”

“What is it? Is everything OK?”

“Mom, I called Taylor. Just to talk to someone. And she was acting funny?”

Mattie’s voice was tight and high, a tone Kathryn knew from previous experience indicated strenuous control over imminent hysteria. Kathryn shut her eyes and pressed her forehead to the cabinet.

“And so I asked her what it was,” Mattie said, “and Taylor said it’s in the news about its being suicide?”

Kathryn could picture Mattie’s face at the other end of the line, the eyes uncertain and wide and panicky. Kathryn could imagine how the news would have bruised Mattie, how her daughter must have hated hearing about the rumor from Taylor. How Taylor, being a normal teenage girl, would have been slightly puffed up to be the one to break the news to Mattie. How Taylor would then feel compelled to call all of their mutual friends with a detailed description of Mattie’s reaction.

“Oh, Mattie,” Kathryn said. “It’s just a rumor. The news media, they get an idea and they go with it before they’ve even checked it out. It’s awful. It’s irresponsible. And it isn’t true. It absolutely isn’t true. I’m here with the airline safety board, and they would know, and they’re denying the rumor very strongly.”

There was a silence.

“But, Mom,” Mattie said. “What if it is true?”

“It’s not true.”

“How would you know?”

Kathryn heard the note of anger in her daughter’s voice. Unmistakable. Why hadn’t she told Mattie the truth that morning during their walk?

“I just know,” Kathryn said.

There was another silence.

“It’s probably true,” Mattie said.

“Mattie, you
knew
your father.”

“Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe I didn’t know him,” Mattie said. “Maybe he was unhappy.”

“If your father was unhappy, I’d have known.”

“But how do you ever know that you know a person?” she asked.

The query momentarily stopped the volley of questions and answers between them, allowing a wave of uncertainty to rise up in front of Kathryn. But she knew that Mattie didn’t want uncertainty now, however much she might have been challenging her mother. Kathryn was sure of this.

“You feel it,” Kathryn said with more bravado than conviction. “Do you feel that you know me?” Mattie asked.

“Pretty well,” Kathryn said.

And then Kathryn realized that she had fallen into a trap. Mattie was good at this, always had been.

“Well, you
don’t
,” Mattie said with a mixture of satisfaction and dread. “Half the time you have no idea what I’m thinking.”

“OK,” Kathryn said, backing off, conceding. “But that’s different.”

“No, it’s not.”

Kathryn brought the heel of her hand to her forehead, massaged it.

“Mom, if it’s true, does that mean that Daddy murdered all those people? Would it be murder?”

“Where did you hear the word?” Kathryn asked quickly, as if Mattie were a child who had just uttered an obscenity she’d learned at school or from a friend. Yet the word
was
profane, Kathryn thought. It was appalling. More appalling for coming from the mouth of her fifteen-year-old daughter.

“I didn’t hear it anywhere, Mom. But I can think, can’t I?” “Look, Mattie. Just hang on. I’ll be right there.”

“No, Mom. Don’t come here. I don’t want you to come. I don’t want you to come here and try to tell me a lot of lies to make things better. Because I don’t want lies right now. It can’t be made better, and I don’t want to pretend. I just want to be left alone.”

How did a fifteen-year-old girl come by such unflinching honesty? Kathryn wondered. The truth was more than most adults could tolerate. Perhaps the young were better at reality, she decided, having had less time to dissemble, create fictions.

Kathryn stifled the impulse to raise her voice, to simply overpower her daughter’s fears and doubts, but she knew from experience not to press Mattie now.

“Mom, there are men here,” Mattie said. “Strange men. All over the place.”

“I know, Mattie. They’re security men to keep the press and public away from the house.”

“You think strangers would want to get in?”

Kathryn didn’t want to frighten her daughter any more than was necessary.

“No, I don’t,” Kathryn said. “But the press can be a nuisance. Look, just sit tight. I’ll be there in just a little while.”

“Fine,” Mattie said tonelessly.

Kathryn stood a minute at the counter with the phone in her hand, regretting the severed connection. She considered calling Mattie back immediately, trying to calm her down, but Kathryn knew that such an effort would be futile. Dealing with a fifteen-year-old, she had learned, sometimes required appeasement. Kathryn hung up the phone and walked to the threshold of the front room. She leaned against the door frame. She crossed her arms over her chest and studied the assembly of investigators and pilots.

There was a question on Robert’s face.

“Everything all right, Mrs. Lyons?” Somers from the Safety Board asked.

“Just fine,” Kathryn answered. “Just fine. That’s apart from the fact that my daughter is struggling to absorb the idea that her father may have committed suicide and taken a hundred and three people with him.”

“Mrs. Lyons …”

“May I be permitted to ask you a question, Mr. Somers?” Kathryn heard the anger in her voice, a good mimic of her daughter’s. Perhaps anger was contagious, Kathryn thought.

“Yes, of course,” the investigator said warily.

“What other scenarios besides suicide have you imagined, given the material that is theoretically on the CVR?”

Somers looked discomfited. “I’m not at liberty to discuss that just now, Mrs. Lyons.”

Kathryn uncrossed her arms, folded her hands in front of her. “Oh, really?” she asked quietly.

She looked down at her feet, then up at the faces in her living room. They were backlit, haloed by the light from the windows.

“Then I guess I’m not at liberty
just now
to answer your questions,” she said.

Robert stood up.

“This interview is over,” she said.

Walking blindly across the lawn, her head down against the wind, she made wispy footprints in the frost gauze of the grass. Within minutes, she was at the seawall, the granite boulders slick with sea spit. She hopped onto a stone the size of a bathtub, felt herself slipping, then sensed that the only way to stay upright was to keep moving, alighting briefly on each rock and then springing to the next. In this way, she reached the “flat rock,” so dubbed by Mattie when she was five and first able to negotiate the rocky sea border. Thereafter, the flat rock became a favored picnic spot for the two of them on sunny days. Kathryn jumped off the edge of the rock onto a five-foot square of sandy beach nestled among the boulders — an outdoor room, a partial shelter from the wind, a hiding place. She turned her back to the house and sat down on the wet sand. She slid her arms out of their sleeves and hugged her chest inside her zippered parka.

“Shit,” she said to her feet.

She let the white noise of the water fill her head, pushing away the voices and faces from the house, faces with thin veils of sympathy over features marked by intense ambition, faces with solemn mouths below keen eyes. Kathryn listened to the soft click of pebbles tumbling in the receding waves. In the pebbles, there was a memory, flirting with her, teasing her. She shut her eyes and tried to concentrate, then gave it up, and in the moment of giving up, found it. A memory of her father and her sitting on pebbles in their bathing suits and letting the sea rush beneath them and wobble the small stones under their thighs and calves. It was summer, a hot day, and she was perhaps nine or ten years old. They were at Fortune’s Rocks, she remembered, and the pebbles tickled her skin. But why were she and her father at the beach without her mother or Julia? Perhaps Kathryn remembered this moment because it was such a rare occurrence, her father and her alone together. He was laughing, she recalled, laughing with genuine, unalloyed pleasure, as a child might do, as he so seldom did. And she thought she would join him in this laughter and just let herself go, but she was so overcome by the sight of her father happy — happy in her presence — that she felt more reverent than uninhibited and, as a result, became confused. And when he turned to ask her what was wrong, she had the distinct sense that she had disappointed him. And so she had laughed then, too loudly, too earnestly, hoping he’d forget the disappointment, but the moment was over, and already he was staring out to sea. She remembered the way her laughter had sounded hollow and contrived, and the way her father had turned away from her, already lost in his own reveries, so much so that Kathryn had had to call to him to get his attention.

Kathryn drew curlicues in the wet sand. It was one of the things she and Jack had had in common, she thought: They were orphans. Not true orphans, precisely, and not for their entire childhoods, but as good as, both of them abandoned when they were too young to know what was happening to them. In Jack’s case, his being orphaned had happened in a more conventional way. His mother had died when he was nine, and his father, who had never been an emotionally demonstrative man, apparently withdrew so far into himself when his wife died that Jack had always had the distinct feeling that he was on his own. In Kathryn’s case, her parents had been physically present but emotionally absent, and had not even been able to provide the simple rudiments of a child’s care. For nearly all of her childhood, Kathryn and her parents had lived with Julia in her narrow stone house three miles southwest of town. It was Julia who supported her parents, who had both been laid off from work when the Ely Falls mills had begun to close. Julia, whose husband had died when Kathryn was only three, did this with the proceeds from her antiques shop. This unusual arrangement did little to improve the relationship between Kathryn’s mother and Julia, and gave Julia a position of control within the household that even Kathryn’s father sometimes found hard to take. But when Kathryn was a girl, she did not think that her family was unusual in any respect. In her class at school, which numbered thirty-two in first grade and dwindled each year until there were only eighteen at graduation, nearly all of the children seemed to live at the margins. Kathryn had friends who lived in trailers, or who had no central heat in the winter, or whose houses would remain dark and shuttered the entire day so that their fathers or uncles could sleep. Kathryn’s parents fought often and drank every day, and even this was not unusual. What was unusual was that they didn’t behave like adults.